As a living lightning rod for the blues, Billy Joe Shaver is one rough 'n' rowdy Texan who's experienced more than enough joy and pain in his 63 years to ever have to go begging for material.
Like Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, and Jimmie Rodgers, Billy Joe has lived the songs he sings—when it's about love, he's embraced it; when it's about grief, he's writhed in it; and when it's about screwing-up, well, Lord knows he's done it. When Shaver kicks his to-the-bone tales back our way, they smack of irrefutable truth—a truth that's delivered with simple, poetic grace.
Billy Joe's never been a stranger to hard knocks (many, to be sure, self-inflicted), but the past few years have been brutal. Following the loss of his wife and his mother less than a month apart to cancer, he—with the aid of his guitarist son Eddy—wrote and recorded The Earth Rolls On, an extraordinarily gripping exploration of guilt, regret, devotion, love and redemption that was roundly acclaimed as one of 2001's finest works.